casa banana

like fiddlehead ferns
smoke incense
snakes out of bottle

Coca Cola glass
curls, spiral
of the mosquito

open-air white sheets
hang sheer funk
on the coconuts

Fifty Years Later...

I meant to post this yesterday on the actual anniversary of the date in the second line of the poem, but alas I was mightily distracted.

Allen Ginsberg

America

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

I feel like you're denying a piece of me...

(Specifically the cowlick over my right eye.)

All is (becoming) well in Ohio. I miss you guys. Cheers.

Donde esta el bano?

Well kids, I'm off to Mexico with an expired passport and a camera in my pocket. I'm gone Jan 8-22 to mexico city, oaxaca and the caribbean coast (including 5 nights in a secluded eco-retreat beachfront cabana in Tulum) and cozumel. It was a bitch to plan (I read 10 different guide books that all had different info), but it's all set. I will bring you back some very nice wares. And if I dont come back, Believe me, I loved you all...
I hope everyone is having a happy and hedonistic new year. Hasta luego!,
LM

Mark Twain Sez...

“New Year's Day… now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.”

Happy New Year, my friends. The nicest thing about 2006 was the three of you.

{gc}

A Very Vegas Christmas

In case you're wondering what you've missed out on, you can view the fabulous time had by yours truly on the Flickr page of my personal photographer. Wish you were here, friends.

Crepapelle (there is a little fork in us all)

Italians are pigs
c'e una forchetta
in everyone

women like carving
naked yellow onions
with butter knives

tear drops on table
lo spirito santo
tied up and scored

saffron threads muffle
all salt cured and waiting
wild boar mouth

al crepuscolo
scamorza on the hearth
thinner than skin

una vecchia
piccolo coltello
slippery tongue

without the madonna
la zuppa di pane
cannot be made

tu ha bisogna
di tutto il cuore
to break good bread

come se dice
where would one find baked goods
in this city?

lacrime christi
in bocca al lupo
your hand in mine

beer, bier, ber before liquer...(a vegas sendoff)

delerium tremins yes
me leffe please the
belgian blonde one
golden chouffe triple
fermented abbey bless
you tiny teeny martini
ginny dirty tootsie
roll milky vanillin
vodka jewels jews olive
juice top martini talks
girty ditty shelf
best bottom sex
ever clear image
of motel 6 sink or chair or
goat cheese crunchy
water salad with straw?
body size bigger is
gay? or was it super 8?
is better walking
jealousy subjects
of night talks water?
platform moves home
is so far away here it is
so hot sleeping in all
my emperors clothing
his hand me down tie

Hey lady, did you pay for the skull mug?

Otto's Shrunken Head, NYC, December 8, 2006

Writers Love to Talk About Themselves!

Upcoming Reading

Erica Hunt and Akilah Oliver at the belladonna* Reading Series

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Dixon Place
258 Bowery
Second Floor

belladonna* is a reading series and small press that promotes the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable, dangerous with language.

When, in Brooklyn, a tree is stunted

When, in Brooklyn, a tree is stunted,

get down on your knees and massage its roots.

Sing Gregorian Chants. Recite Keats to it.

Don’t pull on its limbs or they may break you.

Don’t reach for its hand for it may be dead.

Pardon Me While I Open This Vent...

So yesterday morning, I was on stand-by (because I'm a flake and missed the registration date by two days) to take the GRE Subject Test in English Literature. I decided to apply to the doctoral program at the CUNY Graduate Center for the Fall of '07 because a) several professors here at City and the Grad Center told me I should and offered to write letters of rec, b) I figured out a topic I could write a dissertation about that wouldn't drive me to despair and c) why the hell not?

Anyway, it turns out there are three of us there on stand-by and only two tests. One of these people was Columbia Boy, who had been standing since 6:30 AM out in the cold in front of George Washington High School (the test site). The other was Cool, Funky Girl, who had a high-wattage smile and offered all the other GRE test takers extra pencils and clutched a dogeared copy of the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry to her chest like a talisman.

At first, it appeared that there were three stand-by tests, but this was due to the general imcompetence and confusion of the test-givers. It wasn't discovered that one of the people with an actual appointment was indeed there until I had taken off my jacket, bubbled in all my info on the scantron, and was waiting patiently to crack open the test booklet.

So when it was clear that one of we three stand-bys would have to bow out, I took the bullet. As I got up in front of a classroom full of people, each thankful that they were not the nice guy with the freshly opened chest wound, I wanted to shout out something ridiculous and carefree like "So long, suckers!" Instead, I glanced at Columbia Boy and said "Ahhhhh, I didn't want to be a real professor anyway. I'm still banking on being a famous poet."

To which Columbia Boy said (instead of "Thanks" or "Good luck!" or simply laughing) "Me too!" Which made me want to drive my sharpened number two pencil into his eye. Fuck you, Columbia Boy: You'll still be paying off your $90,000 degree while I'm bedding all the worshipful, geeky girls who come up to me after my brilliant poetry readings across this great land of ours.

Well, not really.

So I guess that was a mitzvah, a good deed--at least, that's what I keep telling myself (instead of Columbia Boy, I should think about what a generous, inspiring professor Cool, Funky Girl will one day become). I know, I know--I can always take it in April and simply apply to the Grad Center for the Fall of 2008. But that's not going to happen. Part of the appeal of this path was a seamless transition from finishing my MFA at City into the Grad Center (and the all the lovely continuance of financial aid that implies). To wait a whole year, and be that much further into my forties (My forties!), before launching on another five years of higher edumacation? Feh.

Why am I posting this, O coterie? Well, I'm feeling slightly low about the whole thing and wanted to share and my proper blog isn't the place for this sort of venting. That I'm low at all is funny, seeing as how I never really wanted to do it in the first place (that is, naturally, until I was prevented from doing it by Cruella DeFate).

But it's okay, right? There's still that whole famous poet thing. Ha. Ha ha.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Let us close this week with the work of photojournalist James Nachtwey, whose images testify not only to the terrors of greed and war, but to a man's dedication to the truth. Like any artist worthy of the title, Nachtwey teaches us--through a medium that competes with the white noise of (mis)information, deceit, and the repetitive strain of everyday living--to look a bit closer at the world, to investigate and question all that we presume to know.

Have a good weekend, everyone. [DR]

Googlism

gregory crosby is a poet and writer
gregory crosby is the author of two chapbooks of poetry
gregory crosby is he or your son vegetarian / vegan? gregory crosby and my
gregory crosby is a freelance writer and editor

Sorry, Google doesn't know enough about laura modigiliani yet.

danny rivera is one of the most sensitive and refined singers of latin america
danny rivera is puerto rico's favorite singer
danny rivera is a sweet
danny rivera is back on the job
danny rivera is a ever

Sorry, Google doesn't know enough about reagan lothes yet.

I want to write
a poem

but find myself
without

my Olivetti &
a copy of

Martha Stewart's
Guide to Free-Range

Cattle.

for happy times click here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QlHKv06gqA

Poem for a Birthday

(for a certain member of the coterie who just turned thirty)

Stack your plate with elegies,
fill your cup with hopium,
this is a night for ultimate poetry.

A coterie round-tables. A giant baby
suckles a thumb, fussy lines
on an etch-a-sketch, lift, erase.

Here is a cracked-out 60s stewardess
manqué. (I am ridiculous.) There are no
white Russians in Mexico.

On banquet table in latticed rectangle, a doctor
examines a kidney stone. A professor unbuttons
over-sized bread knives and sangria sweetens
in glass, slanted. (You’re not vanilla if you add
a little chocolate.) Eat-a! You’re too skinny!

Two Puerto Ricans on a river in Troy,
one man reconfigures faces.

A party favor etches cryptic. Hey tambourine man,
be Tom Petty with a Dylan delivery. Right ass cheeks
rhapsody in purple. (It takes two to make funky cold
wild thing.)

Barbie mouths Nirvana, knee-highed marquis
slams Metallica. Raise your collars, bad medicine
killed Janis Joplin and Koreans hate rap.

Couples with 80s hair meet in cafes, walk
in soft-focus fields. Your 30s are a great decade
up to 35. A train runs on another train’s track.

Aftermath

The problem with a night of karaoke is that the wrong songs get stuck in your head for days afterward. Please, please, please, Lionel Richie/Metallica/Song from "Grease," get OUT of my head!